2007 Develop Conference Day 1

Second Life: The Challenges and Opportunities of User Generated Content

From Flickr and Wikipedia to Spore and Little Big Planet, user generated content is transforming games and the web. The residents of Second Life have built a virtual world that is now 6 times bigger than Manhattan over the last 4 years. This session will explore some of the ways in which user generated content is encouraged in Second Life and will look at the challenges and opportunities of user generated content in general.

CONFERENCE ROOM 5

• Jim Purbrick , Linden Lab Brighton

Design & Story: Beyond the Cutscene

Looking at contemporary cinematic story-telling techniques, the session explores the lessons game developers have learnt from movie makers & investigates the ways this can inform our perceived notions of game design. From overall story-arcs & game-objectives, to moment-by-moment goals & raising the stakes... We invite attendees to think narratively about game design. The session takes a look at successful examples of emotional & narrative tension from films & game s. Attendees will also be asked to to practice & push their skills by collectively work shopping ideas. In a mixture of presentation, workshop & discussion, the session is an opportunity for developers to consider story-telling & design as the same discipline.

CONFERENCE ROOM 3

• Katie Ellwood , Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Textures and Shaders in the HD Era

Now gaming can be experienced in glorious High Definition, the quality of in-game textures is under greater scrutiny than ever before.  This session will explore the methods and solutions that Bizarre Creations have used in PGR4 in their quest to bring greater realism to this highly successful driving game.  The talk will cover the team's approach to diffuse textures, how the use of bump maps and specular maps has changed and improved and how layered shaders are used to create complex subtle textures.  The challenges of getting consistency and making the various processes usable for artists will also be discussed.

CONFERENCE ROOM 4

• Beverley Bright , Bizarre Creations

Studio Brand: Does It Matter?

At the beginning of March this year, Kuju Brighton announced that they were changing their name to Zoe Mode.  The process behind this decision raised interesting questions about "branding" and how this relates to game developers.  Do developers need a "brand"?  Do they have a choice?  Is developer marketing a useful investment?  And who is the developer's brand and marketing aimed at -  gamers, publishers, the press, employees?

Studio Head Ed Daly talks through these questions and the experience for all concerned at Zoe Mode during its recent decision to re-brand.


CONFERENCE ROOM 2

• Ed Daly , Zoe Mode

Production Masterclass

This extended two-hour session (which includes a short mid-session lunch break) will cover a series of key production issues that confront teams doing large international console games, as well as groups doing smaller downloadable projects.   We'll base the flow of portions of the session on real issues facing conference attendees.

Key elements covered include:
Agile Development: buzz words for the latest management fad, or common-sense game project management?
Teams and Settings: how do we best organize our people and our places for innovation and production?
Concept Development and Previsualization: how do we make sure we know what we're producing before production begins?
Audio: how do we deliver quality when so much audio production takes place during the last hurried stages of development?

Come to the session prepared with issues you face in your projects, and exercise the option of having your topic used as an example in exploring best practices in game production.

CONFERENCE ROOM 6

• Jason Avent , Climax Racing Brighton
• Don Daglow , Stormfront Studios
• Richard Jacques , Richard Jacques Studios
• Chris Nuttall , Air Studios
• Dominic Robilliard , SCEE

The N-Gage™ User Experience

Learn how Nokia is working to improve the mobile gaming industry by creating a true Mobile Gaming Platform with the N-Gage experience. The mobile gaming market is growing at a massive rate, but is suffering from too many barriers to the consumer, barriers that will need to be removed to facilitate the creation and growth of a new mobile gaming culture. See how Nokia is starting from the core user experience to improve the entire framework of mobile gaming, making it a better environment for users, publishers, and developers.

Sponsored Session.

CONFERENCE ROOM 1

• Scott Howard , Nokia

An Artist's Guide to the Development of F1 Championship Edition for PS3

A general discussion of the art tools and pipeline developed in house for the production of PS3 launch title: "Formula One Championship Edition"  in 8 months. How these tools were used effectively and the reasons behind their design. A description of assets including: cars, tracks, promotional materials, digital face scanning at the race circuits and  asset production including: in-sourcing, asset pipeline, build process and working practices within the studio. In addition to dealing with the F1 teams and F1 management as well as the issues associated with the development of a big sporting license.

CONFERENCE ROOM 5

• Neil Thompson , SCEE

In-Game Advertising - Why Should You Care?

The in-game ad market is here, and here to stay. The technology works, providing a new revenue stream which, in turn, makes new business models possible for both developers and publishers. Creatively, things have moved on from static billboards. Now, the medium can play a more interactive role within the creative process and provide invaluable feedback on players experiences. Frank Sagnier, a highly experienced industry veteran, will give an insight into how the industry's fast  growing sector can help to create better games, as well as a more profitable industry.

CONFERENCE ROOM 4

• Frank Sagnier , Double Fusion

Retro Revisited: Reinventing the Past for the Modern Gamer

Gamers of a certain age often hark back to bygone days of youth fondly remembering the games they played as children. How many of us have said "games aren't as good as they used to be", but is this true? And more importantly how can we re-visit these games today and full fill the ideal of rekindling past loves while attracting a new audience?

With "Jetpac: Refuelled" for Xbox Live Arcade we have tried to do just that. We look at the design and ethos behind it, the artwork and audio and attempt to draw conclusions that we feel will help push re-imagining retro games forward.

CONFERENCE ROOM 3

• Nick Burton , Rare

Unleash Your Productivity - Proven Patterns for Gameplay Data

This talk first presents examples of common bottlenecks in game production that the audience might have already encountered: the pain of making parameters available to designers, work overload of content coders, designers overwhelmed by UI complexity, the impossibility to get the data for the new AI feature into the level editor, the workarounds to make the data for the latest engine squeeze through the conversion pipeline... and most of those problems only get harder with ever increasing team sizes.

It is reasoned that a good part of those problems are caused by a mysterious neglect of the most important data created during a game production: the data which glues a game together and normally contains most of the game play. Despite its importance, it is usually organised in an ad-hoc way only suitable for quickly thrown together in-house tools based on the needs at the start of a production. This part of the game data is not even given enough attention to have its own name - so we call it simply "the glue" or "gameplay data". This lack of attention is strikingly different to graphics, animations or sound which has been carefully designed by creators of off-the-shelf products or even - in the case of Collada - has been engineered as an attempt to establish a de-facto standard.

The talk makes an argument for treating "the glue" as a first-class citizen and elevating its interface and storage to the status of a separate component in your tools set. A concept for structuring "the glue" is presented which gives a good start in avoiding a lot of the common bottlenecks in a game production. It is explained and shown with non-technical examples how tools can leverage this carefully organized "glue" to make life a lot easier for everybody in the team.

Take Away
Attendees take away a method to tackle common bottlenecks experienced in game production. The method represents a new way of thinking about the data not covered by the standard off-the-shelf tools - especially the data for the actual gameplay. Practical examples are used to demonstrate how this new paradigm can boost the productivity of a game production by allowing flexibility and customizations where needed through its careful separation of game and editor information.

CONFERENCE ROOM 2

• Achim Stremplat , Spielwerke

Production Masterclass
Continued

CONFERENCE ROOM 6

Meeting the Challenge of Next Gen Content Creation

Using 3ds Max and the recent workflow enhancements the ‘productivity booster' brings, he will be focusing on a typical workflow and the challenges faced for next gen games content creation.

Sponsored Session.

CONFERENCE ROOM 1

• Jamie Gwilliam , Autodesk

Game Design Room 101

Four designers each consign a game design horror to the dustbin.

We've all got pet hates in games, but do some of them deserve a wider stage? Hear four top game developers explain a game mechanic, meme, or methodology that really doesn't deserve to make it to the next, next generation. Intelligently controversial, last year's Room 101 session was reported as widely as Business Week! With Dave McCarthy (formerly of Edge magazine and Rockstar Games) hosting this session, it's sure to be a challenging treat once more.

CONFERENCE ROOM 5

• Michael French , Develop Magazine
• Dave McCarthy , Independent Journalist

How Developers Can Use Web 2.0 to Make Real Money

The Internet and Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the way in which consumers expect to interact with their media and entertainment sources.This has profound implications for games companies and designers, especially in an era where budgets are ever-rising and the community is becoming one of the leading locations of gaming information and activity. This session will:

• Show how audiences are changing
• Discuss why community is more than just a forum
• Demonstrate that if you don't build a community, someone else will
• Argue that far being from a cost-centre, embracing the expectations of Web 2.0 users can be a powerful revenue channel and one of the most effective sources of marketing you can find
• Show how Web 2.0 is an opportunity that publishers will be quick to exploit and developers will ignore at their peril

Take Away
Identifying the existing skills that game designers have in Web 2.0 activities and showing how they can be deployed rapidly and effectively
Showing routes to revenue and consumer-interaction that are tangible and potentially rapid

CONFERENCE ROOM 6

• Nicholas Lovell , Gameshadow

Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2

Next generation gaming brought high resolutions, very complex environments and large textures to our living rooms. With virtually every asset being inflated, it's hard to use traditional forward rendering and hope for rich, dynamic environments with extensive dynamic lighting. Deferred rendering, on the other hand, has been traditionally described as a nice technique for rendering of scenes with many dynamic lights, that unfortunately suffers from fill-rate problems and lack of anti-aliasing and very few games that use it were published.

In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We'll show how we utilize PS3's SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output.

Take Away
The session will provide detailed overview and optimizations of modern rendering engine and parallel processing. Many of the topics are applicable for various gaming platforms.

CONFERENCE ROOM 3

• Michal Valient , Guerrilla-Games

The Pitfalls of Game Development: Recruitment Crisis; Creating a Winning Culture & is Crunch Inevitable?

In this session Matthew looks at the challenges of Game Development, most notably the often referred to recruitment crisis; the steps to creating a winning culture; and tackles head on the issue of whether ‘crunch' is inevitable in modern game development.  This promises to be a session touching on controversial issues by EA's leading European Head of Recruitment.

CONFERENCE ROOM 4

• Matthew Jeffery , Electronic Arts

Management Workshop: Getting the Best Out of Writers

So you've hired/are thinking of hiring a writer, but what should you do to get the best from them? Three professional games scribes take a detailed look at the ways in which the industry can best work with writers and story designers. This 2-hour workshop will cover everything from what professional writers can bring to a game and how to best integrate them within your existing team structure, right through to the nuts-and-bolts knowledge of bringing them up to speed with a project, preparing information packages and creating work schedules. The panel will also be drawing on examples from their most recent games including Codemasters' bad guy, action-adventure Overlord. The content is heavily geared towards those managing writers and the writing process.

CONFERENCE ROOM 2

• Rhianna Prachett , Independent Games Writer
• James Swallow , Independent Games Writer
• Andrew Walsh , Independent Games Writer

Using Hansoft for Scheduling, Tracking, Agile and QA in Game Development Projects. Demo and Tutorial

In this session practical examples will be demonstrated on how to use the Hansoft production management tool to address common challenges in game development. Both a scheduling and an Agile approach will be covered as well as quality assurance as an integrated process. Hints, tips and strategies on production management will be shared that can help you ship better games faster.

Sponsored Session.

CONFERENCE ROOM 1

• Patric Palm , Hansoft

Their Money and Your Life - Raising Finance for Games Co's

Whether you're a startup seeking seed funding, an established business looking to grow or a global success looking for an exit, it's all down to the filthy lucre - who's got it, how to get it from them and how much of your soul they'll take in return. Learn how to attract funding on your terms.

CONFERENCE ROOM 5

• Harry Holmwood , Heldhand

Multithreading at Rare

The architecture of the CPU is changing to focus on many-core designs. This talk will give an overview of how Rare uses multithreading on Xbox360, what we can do to squeeze extra performance, and what future technology might allow us to do.

CONFERENCE ROOM 1

• Richard Geary , Rare - Microsoft Games Studios

Level Design - Managing the "Big Picture"?

A game design is a set of concepts and ideas that spans over an entire game. Level design, however, is made up of an infinite number of unique game situations. A game designer must have a broad view of the game whilst the level designer must deal with the minute details of each level. This major difference in perspective can generate several problems that could ruin even the best game concept:

• The game design might not include the necessary level design "bricks" that are indispensable for the development of a rich, balanced and rewarding level design
• Coordinating the work of several level designers each working on their own levels is a real challenge. By definition a level designer is working on the details of his level design. He does not necessarily have the "big picture" in mind.
• Finally, it is very difficult for a manager to assess the content of a level design because of the sheer amount of details and parameters. A manager needs a bird's eye view of the level design to make sure that all levels are homogenous and meet good level design criteria.

Take Away
An overview of what a good level design must include and the tools and good practices to address those challenges.This presentation is essentially targeted at development managers or producers. It will only cover single player level design.

CONFERENCE ROOM 3

• Pascal Luban , The Game Design Studio

A Visual Effects Perspective

A discussion about the working methodology of a Visual Effects Supervisor illustrated with examples from various film projects. The talk will detail the technical and creative aspects of achieving shots, illustrated with breakdowns of work in progress.

CONFERENCE ROOM 4

• Peter Chiang , Double Negative Ltd

Management Workshop: Getting the Best Out of Writers (continued)

Session continued.

CONFERENCE ROOM 2

Home Development Toolkit: Creating Assets for Home

An update talk on the Home Development Toolkit, as a follow-up to the initial details presented at DevStation 07.  An overview of the Summer release of the toolkit will be discussed, including information about the creation of lobby spaces for Home and the creation of scripted arcade games within Home.  An overview roadmap of future releases of the toolkit will be discussed.  A short Q&A session about the toolkit will be held at the end of the talk.

CONFERENCE ROOM 6

• James Cox , Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
• Warren Keyes , SCEE
• Liam Wickham , SCEE